Usually, I prefer manually installing the packages needed for getting started with a new language or technlogy.

I avoid using distro package managers since they tend to be a bit outdated in this regard, and specialised package managers like SDKMAN! seem overkill for one or more packages. Exceptions being languages with excellent tooling and version management like Rust or Ocaml.

I’ve been doing this for a while and was wondering what the general consensus is

Edit: Thanks for your replies everyone! I’ve decided to stick with my distro package manager.

    • @[email protected]
      2•3 months ago

      Nice, thanks!
      I guess it’s a kind of “Easy start” and “Nix”, name a more iconic duo situation XD

      • @Shareni
        3•3 months ago

        It’s actually pretty easy if you start with those files, getting to them was a hellish process that took multiple failed attempts though. I’m actually planning on writing a short guide, but didn’t find the time yet.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•2 months ago

          Finally got to it and I AM SO GIDDY RIGHT NOW!!!
          I looked at your files to know what I should have expected, then, since I’m on Silverblue, I followed this guide https://julianhofer.eu/blog/01-silverblue-nix/ coupled with with Home Manager’s Flake manual and finished off with installing Devbox (through Home Manager, which isn’t listed as one of the official installation options for some reason), made a Python environment with it and… it’s all looking good!
          Declarative workflow, here I come 🤩 (and I can soon shelve all those rusty distroboxes that don’t start anymore because Podman/Distrobox weirdnesses which have been all to frequent in my usage, yikes)

          Thanks again! I probably wouldn’t have taken the plunge so soon without your comment

          • @Shareni
            2•2 months ago

            Niiice, I’m glad you made it and that I was able to help! It’s really funny that your comment came in right after some other dude wrote to me that nix is dying because of drama articles.

            I haven’t heard of devbox before. Why choose it over nix develop?

            • @[email protected]English
              2•2 months ago

              Actually I hadn’t heard about nix develop, I came across Devbox pretty randomly

              useless backstory

              I remembered that I once saw a website Zero to Nix (on which I made a silly joke in the past on Reddit, but for the life of me can’t seem to find so it’s probably deleted) that said it would help learn the concepts of Nix, so I opened it just in case, then i saw that there was this FlakeHub banner on top that piqued my curiosity, I was like, is this a nod to Flathub: zero to nix landing page Then I saw this Fleek thing that sounded like Home Manager but more user friendly (?) fleek in the wild Then I saw that it was deprecated so I was back to Home Manager(which in the end was easy enough anyway), but first I checked out their website that mentioned this Devbox thing devbox in the wilder wild

              Between that and the rest, for the whole journey (that took surprisingly little time) I constantly jumped around from one website to another to piece together information and verify that it was accurate and up to date, to avoid messing up at least this one thing 😵‍💫

              So, after I saw it, I went to look into it more and found that it’s like a sort of nix shell for who is used to NPM and the like and I immediately wanted to try it out, because it just sounded like less mental burden then learning yet another thing, which was devenv as far as I got, which I found through these Reddit and Hacker News discussions.
              So for now I feel right at ~ home with it.
              In your experience, do you think using nix develop would slim things down without sacrificing too much comfort?

              • @Shareni
                2•2 months ago

                Damn, that’s a wild ride.

                I’m honestly not sure how useful that flakehub is, and I feel the same dislike as I do for like AUR. First time I’m seeing it though.

                In your experience, do you think using nix develop would slim things down without sacrificing too much comfort?

                Honestly, I’ve only ever used it a few times when I see that a repo has it. I checked out some of them, and with barely no nix language knowledge I was able to roughly understand what’s going on, but I doubt I’d be able to make it without a template or LLM.

                I’ll keep devbox in mind if I ever need that functionality.

                • @[email protected]
                  2•2 months ago

                  I’m honestly not sure how useful that flakehub

                  Me neither, I completely skipped over it, but it sounds interesting, maybe it wouldn’t be as wonky as the AUR since it’s Nix at least, idk

                  with barely no nix language knowledge I was able to roughly understand what’s going on

                  That’s actually great! Maybe I’ll try those as well, since sooner or later I’ll have to learn the Nix language anyways and keeping a purer system is always a good thing if possible.

                  Good luck with devbox btw

                  edited: how tf did I end up ordering the text like that?

                  • @Shareni
                    2•2 months ago

                    maybe it wouldn’t be as wonky as the AUR since it’s Nix at least

                    That’s for sure, since nix handles dependencies a lot better than pacman. But I meant that due to the sheer size of nixpkgs, and the way you can add a repo to your flakes, there’s no real need for it. But that’s just pure speculation.

                    I think a sensible progression is: nix + home-manager -> flakes -> develop -> nixOS

                    You build on previous knowledge without getting overwhelmed. I tried using guixos without ever using guix or nix, and it’s really not nice when you have to spend a week trying to figure out how to do something that takes you 5 mins in a regular distro. It even took me a few attempts to get started with nix simply because the docs are abysmal, almost all info is on nixos, and home-manager is rarely mentioned.